The Dish

The cover-letter accompanying the Vatican’s ban on all gay seminarians has some added detail. The policy is to be stringently enforced; and celibate gay priests are also to be barred from any teaching role in seminaries. Again, what matters is not how good a teacher or theologican they are; not whether they abide by their vows to celibacy; what matters is that they are gay. That is now itself a bar. Tell me how this isn’t unvarnished discrimination. To allow gay priests to remain in their orders, and then to treat them as second class priests? Am I the only person gob-smacked by this?

“Even with the strenuous body-hardening exercise routines now compulsory for movie stars, at age 36 the forces of nature have won out over the view-worthiness of the unsupported female bust. It is, in fact, a sad truth about human life that beyond our salad days, very few of us are interesting to look at in the buff. Added to that sadness is the very unfair truth that a woman’s salad days are shorter than a man’s – really, in this precise context, only from about 15 to 20.” – John Derbyshire on why under-age and teenage female boobs are the only ones he finds worth looking at.

South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution explicitly granted gays and lesbians full rights as citizens. There is no valid citizenship without the right to marry the person you love; and so the global movement toward equality in marriage advances again. Who would have guessed twenty years ago that the land of apartheid would now be ahead of the United States in its support for civil rights and equal protection of laws?

The president’s speech yesterday was, to my mind, a massive improvement on the phony pep-rallies he has deployed in the past. Someone in the White House has finally realized that a war needs to be explained to the people paying for it, that details are important, strategy can be laid out in specifics, that errors can be conceded as a matter of strength, not weakness. Of course, it would have been better if the president had been giving similar and more candid speeches like this on a monthly basis for the last three years. But better late than never. It’s also encouraging for the troops, who prefer being told the truth rather than fed a bunch of politicized hooey. Still, our position is on the edge of a knife. I’m by no means confident that our war goals can be achieved before American patience runs out. But I do feel our current strategy is about as good as we can get; I do have confdence in General Casey (if not Rumsfeld); in Rice (if not Cheney); and in Khalilzad. The Iraqi people – the long-suffering, triply betrayed Iraqi people – deserve our resilience in this. We should put our feelings about this president to one side and consider the national interest, and our remaining moral responsibility for the almighty but still-promising mess we have created.

So we’re spinning the Iraqi press by planting propaganda in its pages? BFD. The only problem with this scheme, it seems to me, is not that somehow it’s unethical to use propaganda in wartime, especially in occupied areas where local support is crucial. This is war, as some people still refuse to understand. The problem is that media is now global, the free citizens of Iraq can access information from almost anywhere on earth, and these stories will leak and backfire. We’re adjusting to war in a new media universe. We haven’t adjusted swiftly enough.

“Awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Muhammad Ali gratuitously celebrated a man profoundly opposed to Mr. Bush’s own, his party’s, and the country’s principles. It represents, I submit, the nadir of his presidency.” – Daniel Pipes, in the New York Sun.

On a poster!

An emailer makes the following point:

Usury usually means the charging of interest at an “exorbitant” rate. The pope is going after loan sharks, not banks or credit unions, or 401Ks for that matter.

The church is headed in the wrong direction in so many ways, but combating predatory lenders is not one of them. Predatory lenders break up families, are a drain on the economy and exacerbate poverty. This is a fight worth having, and I, for one, am glad the Pope is speaking out about it.

The trouble, of course, is that usury has an ancient meaning in Catholic doctrine and it has historically meant any interest on loans, which was indeed integral to the rise of Catholic anti-Semitism. But I do see that the more modern meaning of excessive interest rates is a reasonable inference; and I have no problem with criticizing it.

I am constantly being told that every position I hold – from support for flat taxes and balanced budgets, to opposition to affirmative action, hate crime laws, and torture – is simply a function of my being gay. Here’s a recent contribution to the topic:

The key to everything Sullivan writes is the defense of his sex life. His attacks on Bush suddenly began after Bush said no to gay sex. And, of course, his increasingly shrill loathing of Benedict springs from the same source. Now, an attacker can exploit an enemy’s weakness or he can try to create a weakness where one does not exist. In the case of Bush, [Bush] really is vulnerable on the question of torture and Sullivan has been doing a bang-up job pointing out the weakness of the Administration and its apologists on this matter. I have serious difficulty believing he would be nearly so passionate if Bush had announced that he would do everything in his power to make gay marriage the law of the land. In that event, I think we’d be reading lots of fawning suck-up pieces about Bush’s “tough stands” against international terror, etc.

Not a word of this with respect to my motives is true; and all of it is deeply offensive. Bush supported sodomy laws in Texas and strongly opposed gay marriage when I reluctantly endorsed him in 2000. My opposition to Bush’s massive spending began long before Bush backed amending the Constitution to deny gay citizens civil rights. My opposition to the conduct of the war began very early – almost as soon as looting took place and Rumsfeld embraced the chaos his terribly-managed occupation had begun to foster. I’m used to these slurs, and the record shows they are baseless. But the notion that I would be finding excuses for torture if Bush had refused to back the FMA is so vile an attack on my integrity it deserves a response. My position on this question has been the same my whole life. I grew up reading Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. I was educated to have an acute awareness of the evil of totalitarianism, and to see torture as that system’s ultimate weapon. Anyone committed to human freedom in any way finds torture an abomination; and my abhorrence of it stems from my religious faith and also my love for America and all she has always stood for. To try and trivialize my position on this, as James Taranto disgustingly did, and as Mark Shea now does, is simply beneath civilized discourse. As is the crude reduction of my defense of the dignity and equality of homosexual persons as a mere defense of my own “sex life”.

To appreciate fully the sweep and depth of the Vatican’s attack on the dignity and integrity of all homosexual persons – our alleged psychological sickness, our inability to relate to men and women, our affective “immaturity,” our clannishness, our selfishness, our insufficiently “masculine sexual identity,” and on and on – you can read this story. The sheer accumulation of unfounded slurs, malicious smears and unsubstantiated prejudice should remove from any reasonable person’s mind the notion that the Vatican is not now a repository for bigotry and hatred of the clearest kind. The new policy is a betrayal of charity, of faith and of truth. Kathryn Lopez makes the following point:

Andrew Sullivan’s post on the life of Fr. Mychal Judge is heartbreaking – that anyone would conclude that the Catholic Church thinks that if Fr. Judge (the priest who died ministering at the World Trade Center on 9/11) was a gay man his life had “no social value.” The Catholic Church says no such thing.

I refer her to the Vatican’s official gloss on its new ban on even celibate gay priests here. I quote:

The article by Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a French Jesuit and psychologist, said homosexuality could not be considered an acceptable moral alternative to heterosexuality.
“During these past years, homosexuality has become a phenomenon that is always increasingly worrying and in many countries is considered a quality that is normal,” the article in L’Osservatore Romano said. The article was specifically approved by the Vatican’s secretariat of state.
“It (homosexuality) does not represent a social value and even less so a moral virtue that could add to the civilization of sexuality,” Anatrella said.

Yes, homosexuals, in so far as they are homosexual, have no “social value.” Our commitments and loves and relationships, moreover, have no “moral virtue.” We are moral Untermenschen, a class of human beings inherently incapable of serving God in any religious orders. I hope that Lopez will correct herself. She is, sadly, mistaken.